Thank you for your email of 1 October 2015. The Minister
has seen your email and asked me to respond.

In your email you refer to an earlier response by Mr Ian
Maye, then Deputy Secretary in the Department, which you feel was an
insufficient reply to your original questions of 17 July 2015. In his letter Mr
Maye set out that a review of the events surrounding the excavation of the
crannog at Drumclay has been completed. As you are aware, this review was led
by Professor Gabriel Cooney, Chair of the Historic Monuments Council and
Professor of Celtic Archaeology at University College Dublin. Professor Cooney
was aided in his review by Sarah Witchell, a member of the Historic Monuments
Council and qualified solicitor and legal consultant, alongside Nick Brannon,
also a member of the Historic Monuments Council, a former Director of Built
Heritage, and former President of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology.
The qualifications and experience of the review panel were therefore relevant
and wide-ranging.

The terms of reference for the review were set out for the
panel of experts by Alex Attwood, then Minister of the Environment. The review
met its terms of reference, presented its findings and identified six
recommendations for further action. The six recommendations have been accepted
by the Minister and work is ongoing to implement them. I can report that some
of the recommendations have already been addressed and that all will be by
April 2016.

As to your other queries, it is my opinion that in
addressing the six recommendations we will have met the requirements of the
Drumclay Review findings and have addressed the legitimate concerns you have
raised. In stating this, I note that, in your recent correspondence, you
"broadly agree with Prof Cooney's six recommendations". I also note
your suggestion as to broadening recommendations 1-3 to include all commercial
sector archaeological excavations in Northern Ireland; this is something that
we are already considering. However, it is the delivery of the review
recommendation action plan that is the primary focus at this time.

Finally, you mention the post-excavation process for the
crannog excavation and the possible making public of what you term a 'roadmap'
to completion and publication. The matter of completion and publication is
something we have been carefully considering. As Mr Maye stated in his letter,
this is recognised as an important work area but, as with many other government
funded activities, is dependent on available resources. I anticipate that, as
you request, Historic Environment Division will make our 'roadmap' available to
the public in due course.

Yours sincerely

IAIN GREENWAY

Director, Historic Environment Division

Drumclay under excavation

Cutting through the waffle,
it is clear that the NIEA claim to be working on implementing Cooney’s
recommendations and that they expect to have this process completed by April
2016. Further, they think that broadening Cooney’s first three recommendations
(currently only referencing road schemes) to include all developer-led has some
merit and that it is already under consideration by NIEA. That’s, really, as
good as it gets in terms of answering actual, direct questions. Greenway
appears to be unfamiliar with the usage of the word ‘roadmap’ to refer to ‘any plan or guide to
show how something is arranged or can be accomplished’, twice using it
within inverted commas. It hardly fills me with confidence that he then resorts
to the same insipid, evasive language that I repeatedly received about when
Cooney’s Report would be published. Considering the difficulty encountered in
getting the DoE to release the Cooney Report, I will treat Greenway’s use of
“in due course” with the degree
of caution it deserves. As for publication of this exceptionally important
site, Greenway considers it ‘an important work area’ but is ‘dependent on
available resources’ … I don’t know about of you, dear reader, but I’m hardly
overcome with any sense that this is a priority for Greenway or the NIEA: ‘Yeah
… if we get some spare cash, we’ll probably do something about it, but don’t
hold your breath!’

Greenway is also of the
opinion that the NIEA’s implementation of Cooney’s six recommendations will
address “the legitimate concerns you have raised” … well, that’s lovely and I’m
really happy for them, but it doesn’t actually answer the actual questions …
actually ... Considering that several of the questions are specifically noted
as not being addressed by Prof
Cooney’s report, the assertion that they will automatically be addressed by his
recommendations seems unlikely. I have nothing but respect for Prof Cooney’s abilities,
but claiming that issues he does not address or identify will be miraculously
cured by recommendations not intended to address them may be filed under “eloquent
and insincere rhetoric.”

While I’m loath to
admit it, the problem may be one of my own making. I realise that my writing
style can be somewhat convoluted and demanding, and not always conducive to
understanding and simple clarity. Hush! Hush, dear reader! I know you will
disagree, but it is true. I have run my ‘enlarged’ set of questions through
MSWord’s spelling and grammar checker and find that they have a Flesch
Reading Ease score of 29.9, indicating that it is ‘best understood by
university graduates’ and are on the borderline between Difficult
and Very Confusing. With a mind to simplifying the questions, I’ve attempted
to rewrite them in the following manner:

1) John O’Keeffe has
made comments in print and in person that there were ‘many inaccuracies’ in the
reporting of the events around this situation. These have now been shown to be
false and baseless. Will you please instruct him to issue a full apology to
myself and the others involved in this campaign?

2) Have you or will you
issue guidance on how to ensure that NIEA are represented by suitably
senior/qualified people at meetings with other agencies, Departments, and
companies?

3) Will you be
organising an investigation into John O’Keeffe and his Senior Inspectors
failure of leadership and appropriate communication?

4) Will you explain the
circumstances around the Prof Cooney’s allegation of unlicensed trenching?

5) Who met with Declan
Hurl to discuss these allegations and to who were the minutes of these meetings
passed for action?

6) Will you explain why
NIEA did not seek to prosecute anyone for this alleged of unlicensed trenching?

7) Who made the decision
not to prosecute?

8) Why was this
decision not challenged by NIEA personnel?

9) Can you explain whether
the Senior Inspectors were deliberately hiding their actions from John
O’Keeffe, or were they working without sufficient support and oversight from
their manager?

10) Will the staff
involved in this case be sent on training and receive mentoring to improve
their future performance?

11) If this does not
succeed, will you consider redeploying the individuals to less demanding roles
or removing them from the organisation?

12) Will you make a
commitment to disciplining NIEA members who have acted improperly?

13) As John O’Keeffe’s
appears to have been fed incomplete or false information by Senior Inspector
Maybelline Gormley do you not have cause to question her competency and
ability?

14) Will you extend
Prof Cooney’s recommendations 1-3 to cover all commercial sector excavations in
Northern Ireland? [Partially answered, but I don’t want it to disappear off the
list!]

16) Will you allocate
increased funding to the Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record?

17) Would investing in
the NISMR be more expensive than another Drumclay excavation?

18) Will you issue
guidance on whether engineering firms should supply their own archaeological
professionals, or whether there should be a degree of separation between the
two groups?

19) Will you issue a
statement to appropriately acknowledge the vital actions of the Cherrymount Crannog Crisis group and the
various stakeholders of the advocacy movement in bringing this case to a
successful conclusion?

20) Do you actually
have a plan to conserve and publish the Drumclay material?

21) Will you make this
plan public? [Not just Greenway’s “in due course”]

22) Will you make the
conservation, analysis, and publication of the Drumclay material a priority for
the NIEA?

I have striven to make
the questions more direct to facilitate clarity. The questions now have a Flesch
Reading Ease of 42.4, still ‘Difficult’ but quite an improvement. It’s hardly
the stuff of XKCD’s Up Goer Five, but it
is a start. Hopefully the questions are now sufficiently clear that they can be
directly answered by either the Minister or his chosen subaltern. With this in
mind, I have written yet again to Minister Mark H. Durkan:

Your ref: TOF-1286-2015

Dear Minister Durkan,

Thank you so much for Iain Greenway’s October 19 reply to
my second attempt to get a series of clear and concise answers to several
questions arising from Prof Cooney’s report into the Drumclay fiasco. While Mr
Greenway’s reply is strong on restating the obvious and well-known, he is less
successful at answering any of the questions that have been asked of you.

To facilitate clearer communication, I have recast the
original request as a leaner, cleaner set of 22 individual questions. While Mr
Greenway’s response partially answers Question 14 (on the expansion of Prof
Cooney’s Recommendations 1-3 to cover all development-led archaeological
excavations), and touches on Questions 20 and 21 (the Department’s plan to
conserve and publish the material from the site - though it is by no means
certain that he understands the terminology used), his bland assertion that the
implementation of Prof Cooney’s Recommendations will answer all my other
queries is patently ridiculous and blatantly disingenuous. While I appreciate
that this is given as his opinion, I cannot stress enough that I am seeking direct,
concrete answers, not opinions.

Thus, it is in hope that – on the third time of asking –
you can find someone on your staff with the necessary intellectual acuity to
answer these questions without prevarication and dissembling, that I submit
them to you once again.

Yours,

Robert M Chapple

PS – my analysis of Greenway’s letter and a fuller
explanation of my reasoning can be found on my blog [here]

Such answers as I shall
receive will be posted to this blog in due course …